Mobile communication devices are becoming increasingly popular for business and personal use due to a relatively recent increase in number of services and features that the devices and mobile infrastructures support. Handheld mobile communication devices, sometimes referred to as mobile stations, are essentially portable computers having wireless capability, and come in various forms. These include Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), cellular phones and smart phones. While their reduced size is an advantage to portability, bandwidth and processing constraints of such devices present challenges to the downloading and viewing of documents, such as word processing documents, tables and images.
Electronic documents are produced using various computer programs, such as word processors, spreadsheet programs, financial software, and presentation software. In addition to text, such documents contain structural and property information such as paragraph indentation, text color and table size, etc.
The downloading of an entire document, including structural and property information, to a mobile communication device consumes a large amount of bandwidth, especially when the document is very large. In addition, viewing even a portion of such a downloaded document on the device consumes substantial device CPU/memory/battery resources.
For example, if a user wishes to view only a paragraph in a section in the middle of a 400-page document, the section that contains some of the default properties for the paragraph, or even the entire document, must be transmitted to the mobile communication device. Yet, the user only views a small portion of the document on the mobile communication device.